The No Man's Sky PC launch is a disaster

PlayStation 4 players of No Man's Sky have been gushing over it all week as we came to the eagerly awaited global PC launch. Only that PC launch has been pretty disastrous, with less than 50% positive reviews on Steam for much of the first day.

Why so bad? A large number of players are seeing huge frame rate issues and massive stuttering, even on low settings with high-end hardware. Including us.

We've loaded up No Man's Sky on a Skylake quad-core i7 and a GTX 1080 and can't play it for any length of time, even on low settings at 1080p, without massive glitches and frame rate drops, some times as low as 5fps. But it isn't just us, that wouldn't be a story.

Reports are flying across the web, and you only have to hit Reddit and Steam to see leagues of unhappy customers, many even getting refunded because the game is that bad for them right now. A day 1 patch has already been pushed out but it's not made anything better for us, or many others it seems. It's not localized to just NVIDIA hardware, either, with a number of AMD users also seeing similar issues.

As we keep being reminded, Hello Games is a small team, but regardless this is a AAA priced title at $60. On one hand the PS4 version seems to be faultless, on the other the PC version is virtually unplayable for many. We'll have to wait and see what fixes come out in the coming days, but for now, maybe hold off dropping your money.

Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine